Richard Stallman: Free Software Supporter — Issue 60, March 2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Petition to protect the right to unlock cellphones garners 111,000+ signers; White House must now respond

Interview with Adam Hyde of Booktype

2012 Free Software Award winners announced

New and improved label for DRM-free files

Document Freedom Day: 2013

Trisquel 6.0 LTS “Toutatis” has arrived!

May 2012: RMS at the Fórum da Revista Espírito Livre, in Vila Velha

Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory

LibrePlanet featured resource: End Software Patents group

GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry: 29 new GNU releases!

GNU Toolchain update

Richard Stallman’s speaking schedule

Thank GNUs!

Take action with the FSF

Tell W3C: We don’t want the Hollyweb

From March 22nd

Hollywood’s latest ploy to take over the Web? Use its influence at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to weave Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) into HTML5 — in other words, into the very fabric of the Web. Sign Defective by Design’s petition to say no to the Hollyweb and keep DRM in HTML5. With your help, we can reach 50,000 signers by the International Day Against DRM on May 3rd.

LibrePlanet 2013 conference

From March 24th

On March 23 and 24, the FSF held its yearly software freedom conference, LibrePlanet. This year’s theme was “Commit Change”: a focus on making connections to other movements and building diversity within free software. We at the FSF are very happy with how the conference turned out. If you weren’t there this year, we hope to see you in 2014!

See our blog post from the first day of the conference (lots of photos inside):

Google backslides on federated instant messaging, on purpose?

From March 15th

Turns out, Google has started blocking invites sent from non-Google Jabber servers. Subscription requests just disappear mysteriously, confusing both users and server operators. This change is akin to Google no longer accepting incoming e-mail for @gmail.com addresses from non-Google domains.

Petition to protect the right to unlock cellphones garners 111,000+ signers; White House must now respond

From February 28th

On February 13th, we asked you to join in with thousands of others to call on the White House to protect users where the Copyright Office had failed. Because of your actions, the White House now must respond to the call to fix the DMCA anti-circumvention exemptions list in order to protect the right to unlock cell phones.

Interview with Adam Hyde of Booktype

From March 21st

This is the latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works. In this edition, we interviewed Adam Hyde via email. Adam is the founder of Booktype — a book production platform released under AGPLv3, as well as Book Sprints, and FLOSS Manuals.

2012 Free Software Award winners announced

From March 23rd

Richard Stallman announced the winners of the FSF’s annual Free Software Awards at a ceremony on Saturday, March 23rd, held during the LibrePlanet 2013 conference. The Award for the Advancement of Free Software was given to Dr. Fernando Perez for IPython, a tool for scientific analysis, and the Award for Projects of Social Benefit was given to OpenMRS, a medical record-keeping system being implemented in the world’s poorest countries.

New and improved label for DRM-free files

From March 7th

We recently announced the DRM-free label, an effort to create recognizable branding for providers of DRM-free files to quickly communicate to users that they don’t have to worry about being encumbered by restrictive technologies such as Digital Restrictions Management. Today, we’re happy to share with you the next version of the DRM-free label, immediately available for use in multiple languages and styles.

Trisquel 6.0 LTS “Toutatis” has arrived!

From March 9th

This long awaited release is based on Ubuntu Precise, and as usual comes full of free software goodness. We continue to provide an easy to use classic desktop experience complete with full-featured browsing, office, communications and social networking utilities. Download it while it is hot!

May 2012: RMS at the Fórum da Revista Espírito Livre, in Vila Velha

RMS was in Vila Velha, Brazil, on 29 May 2012, to speak on the free software movement, at the second edition of the Fórum da Revista Espírito Livre, to a diverse audience of about 500 students, teachers, and free software activists.

Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory

Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth of useful information, from basic category and descriptions to version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing. The Free Software Directory has been a great resource to software users over the past decade, but it needs your help staying up-to-date with new and exciting free software projects.

To help, join our weekly IRC meetings on Fridays from 2:00pm to 5:00pm EDT (18:00 to 21:00 UTC) . Meetings take place in the #fsf channel on irc.gnu.org, and usually include a handful of regulars as well as newcomers. Everyone’s welcome.

LibrePlanet featured resource: End Software Patents group

Every month on LibrePlanet, we highlight one resource that is interesting and useful — often one that could use your help.

For this month, we are highlighting the LibrePlanet group page those who participate in the End Software Patents campaign. ESP works to abolish all software patents, rather than engaging in the hopeless task of swatting individual patents. There are lots of ways to get involved with this important effort. Check out the group!

This month, we welcome Cynthia Rempel as the new maintainer of the pgccfd document and Jeffrin Jose as the new maintainer of GNU dap (in addition to already maintaining GNU trueprint, with a new release this month).

Take action with the FSF

Contributions from thousands of individual members enable the FSF’s work. You can contribute by joining at http://www.fsf.org/join. If you’re already a member, you can help refer new members (and earn some rewards) by adding a line with your member number to your email signature like:

The FSF is also always looking for volunteers (http://www.fsf.org/volunteer). From rabble-rousing to hacking, from issue coordination to envelope stuffing — there’s something here for everybody to do. Also, head over to our campaign section (http://www.fsf.org/campaigns) and take action on software patents, DRM, free software adoption, OpenDocument, RIAA and more.